The Unquiet

“Ukrainians,” he said. “Maybe Georgians. Not Chechens.”

“Is that good?”

He shrugged. It seemed to be contagious. “They all bad,” he said. “Chechens just real bad.”

“The redhead didn’t seem like a foot soldier.”

“Underboss. Means they real pissed about Demarcian.”

“He doesn’t seem worth that kind of effort.”

“They lose business. Cops start tracing their clients, ask questions about pictures of children. Can’t let it slide.”

But he seemed to be holding something back.

“What else?”

“I don’t know. Feels off. I’ll ask around, see what I hear.”

“Will they be back?”

“Uh-huh. Might help if we found Merrick first, buy us a little influence.”

“I’m not going to give them Merrick.”

“Might not have a choice.” He started to walk back to the house.

“What does ‘blat’ mean?” I asked.

“Co

“And ‘volk’?”

“It’s slang, word for a cop or an investigator. Kind of a compliment.” He put his gun back in its shoulder holster. “It means ‘wolf.’”

Chapter XXIX

We drove north to Jackman late that afternoon, through Shawmut and Hinckley and Skowhegan, through Solon and Bingham, Moscow and Caratunk, past places without names and names without places, the road following the bends and curves of the Ke

We were following the route that Arnold took on his expedition up the Ke

I was struck by a sense of landscape layered upon landscape, past upon present. These rivers and forests were inseparable from their history; the distinction between what was now and what had gone before was fragile here. It was a place where the ghosts of dead soldiers passed through forests and over streams that had changed little in the intervening years, a place where family names had remained unaltered, where people still owned the land that their great-grandfathers had bought with gold and silver coin, a place where old sins persisted, for great change had not come to wash away the memory of them.

So this was the land traversed by Arnold ’s army, the soldiers equipped with rifles, axes, and long knives. Now other bands of armed men moved through this landscape, adding their clamor to the creeping silence of winter, holding it at bay with the roar of their guns and the growl of the trucks and quads that carried them into the wilderness. The woods were alive with orange-clad fools, businessmen from Massachusetts and New York taking a break from the golf course to blast at moose and bear and buck, guided by locals who were grateful for the money the outsiders spent yet remained resentful of the fact that they needed it to survive.

We made but one stop along the way, at a house that was little more than a shack, three or four rooms in all, its windows unwashed and the interior hidden by cheap drapes. The yard was overgrown. A garage door gaped open, revealing rusted tools and stacks of firewood. There was no car, because one of the conditions of Mason Dubus’s parole was that he was not permitted to drive a vehicle.

Louis waited outside. I think, perhaps, that he would have found Dubus’s company intolerable, for Dubus was a man like those who had abused Louis’s beloved Angel, and it was Louis’s greatest regret that he had never been given the opportunity to punish those who had scarred his lover’s soul. So he leaned against the car and watched silently as the door was opened slightly, a chain securing it, and a man’s face appeared. His skin was yellow and his eyes were rheumy. His one visible hand shook with uncontrollable tremors.

“Yes?” he said, and his voice was surprisingly firm.

“Mr. Dubus, my name’s Charlie Parker. I think someone called to let you know I might want to speak with you.”

The eyes narrowed. “Maybe. You got some, whatchacallit, ID? A license or something?”

I showed him my PI’s license. He took it from me and held it close to his face, examining each and every word upon it, then handed it back to me. He looked beyond me to where Louis was standing.

“Who’s the other fella?”

“He’s a friend.”

“He’s go

“I think he’d prefer to wait where he is.”

“Well, it’s his call. Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

The door closed for a moment, and I could hear the rattling as the security chain was removed. When it opened again, I got my first proper look at Dubus. He was hunched by age and illness, and by his years in prison, but there was still a vestige of the big, strong man that he had once been. His clothes were clean and carefully ironed. He wore dark trousers, a blue-striped shirt, and a tightly knotted pink tie. He was wearing an old-fashioned eau de cologne that bore hints of sandalwood and incense. The interior of the house gave the lie to any first impressions evoked by the exterior. The floorboards shone, and it smelled of furniture polish and air freshener. There were paperback books on a small shelf in the hallway, on top of which stood an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone. Nailed to the wall above it was a copy of the “Desiderata,” a kind of twelve-step program for those afflicted by the trials of modern life. The rest of the walls were decorated with prints of paintings in cheap frames-some modern, some much older, and most unfamiliar to me-although the images had clearly been carefully chosen.

I followed Dubus into his living room. Again, everything was clean, even though the furniture had come from thrift stores and was scuffed and worn. A small TV sat on a pine table, tuned to a comedy show. There were more prints on the walls here, as well as a couple of originals, each depicting a landscape. One of them seemed familiar. I walked over to take a closer look at it. From a distance, it appeared to be a painting of a forest, a line of green trees against a red sunset, but then I saw that one of the trees stood taller than the rest and had a cross at its highest point. Daniel Clay’s signature was visible in the bottom right-hand corner. It was Gilead.